Here’s a list of tools we’ve purchased over the years that have served us well. I would recommend these to anyone in the hobby.
- Soldering Station – This is a good quality soldering station for a decent price. I like the controls and how well it performs
- Soldering Iron Replacement – Aoyue B004 replacement soldering iron. We accidentally damaged our first one by letting it get too hot for too long
- Soldering Iron Tip Cleaner – Tip cleaner replacements we’ve purchased
- Soldering Helping Hands – A solid soldering assistance tool
- Solder – Good quality solder perfect for the soldering lighting wires and strips
- Heat Shrink Butt Wire Electrical Crimp Connectors – As of 2016 we moved to using these in place of soldering and the experience was AMAZING. Have used over 6000 of these so far without a single issue
- Crimping Tool – The crimping tool used on the heat shrink butt connectors mentioned above
- Heat Gun – This heat gun is great and very high quality. What we use to shrink the heat shrink butt connectors mentioned above
- Heat Shrink Tubing – When we don’t use the heat shrink butt connectors we use these to seal open / exposed wires and it works well
- Butane Torch – We’ve also used this butane torch to the heat shrink tubing as well as the heat shrink butt connectors
- Butane Fuel – Fuel made to refill the butane torch listed above
- Glue Gun – Great high quality glue gun that even allows you to unplug it for up to five minutes and still use it. We’ve used it for a number of things but mainly for sealing items
- Glue – Perfect glue for the glue gun mentioned above
- Multimeter – A tool we use all the time to take all sorts of power and resistance measurements. I would highly recommend to anyone in this hobby
- Wire Snips – Good quality wire snips…a must have in this hobby
- Wire Stripper – Good quality wire strippers…a must have in this hobby
- Wire Toner / Tracer – Used this to tone out end of cable when our labeling has failed us. Good quality product and you’ll definitely find it handy
- Kill-A-Watt Electricity Usage Monitor – Great tool for taking quick power measurements, of multiple types, from a standard NEMA 5-15 interface
- Pixel Pliers – These will save your fingers and hands much pain when inserting thousands of pixel nodes into props. These are amazing!!